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Taking eLearning and Agent Training to the Next Level

It’s
a conundrum that has plagued the customer service industry since its inception.
Contact center agents are the front line of any business and their performance has
a major impact on productivity, effectiveness and customer satisfaction. But they
also have a far tougher job than most people imagine and too often, reps are
hired in an expediency process and then rushed into the trenches with
inadequate or ineffective training. This results in confusion and frustration which
inevitably leads to an unacceptable attrition rate that dramatically increases
the cost of contact center operation.

Adding to the dilemma are the challenges
of providing productive educational experiences for outsourced personnel with
different cultural backgrounds. But perhaps most problematical of all is creating
programs that are relevant and produce the desired results for millennials raised
in an environment where self-esteem is more important than achievement. Marie
Ferrer, Senior Director of Training for Florida-based Great LearningWorks
summed it up “The key is keeping millennials engaged”.

While
there is mixed opinion among psychologists on whether millennials (those born
between 1981 and 2004) will be vital contributors to society or a factor in its
downfall, there is agreement that this generation learns differently than any
of their predecessors. In a culture that has been inundated with multimedia
stimuli that turns everyone into a multitasker and attention spans that have
been dramatically shortened, a talking head in front of a class or onscreen is
not going to hold their interest.

Forward-thinking education providers in
the contact center space have taken note of this phenomenon and have developed training
solutions geared to today’s changing educational needs. Among the key
strategies in the mix is microlearning: personalized, bite-sized learning
content in short bursts (anywhere from 90 seconds - 4 minutes), delivered several
times per week, or even daily. Learning content can be accessed on a variety of
devices over the Internet. “Microlearning addresses the needs of agents who
must quickly absorb information and retain it while still engaged in the
learning process,” said Ferrer. “It enables businesses to break
down complex ideas and skills into simple learning topics. We call it Learning Bytes.”

Great LearningWorks’ Ferrer has had an
up-close and personal view of the evolution in contact center training. The
position that shaped her career was a 9-year stint as Training Manager for
American Express where she often walked the contact center floor to assess
employee performance. “When I started, we had to physically move agents into
the classroom and include the walk time as part of their schedule,” she
recalls. ”It’s come a long way over the years, and while it’s widely accepted
that delivering information to the desktop is a more efficient learning method,
there are still a surprising number of companies who still do it the
old-fashioned way by taking their staff away from their stations for sit-down
classroom sessions.”

After broadening her perspective at a
major BPO, Ferrer was hired by Great Healthworks, a provider of
direct-to-consumer health and wellness programs to create an internal training
department, which stared out as strictly a brick-and-mortar operation. But as
she began to develop content, it not only morphed into a digitally delivered
program, but went far beyond its original scope. “Ultimately, it was viewed as
an entity to outsource all training needs and we spun off as an independent
company.”

The program is based on what they refer
to as a VAK model (visual, auditory and kinesthetic), designed to allow
learners to hear, see and touch their materials to promote the achievement of learning
objectives and optimal knowledge retention, providing gap analysis in cases
where a significant portion of the learning group is having specific problems
and can be customized to the individual. Great
LearningWorks offers complete hosting services with fully managed bandwidth,
storage, backup and recovery as well as global content distribution. In
addition, they are able to provide HTML5 for multiple viewing options.

Axonify, based in Waterloo, Ontario
(Canada) offers microlearning as part of what they term an ‘Employee Knowledge
Platform’, based on the latest brain science research, gamification and
adaptive learning. The solution allows employees to follow their own unique
knowledge path that adapts and expands as their level of comprehension grows.
“It’s an end-to-end experience that produces results. It enables employers to
set day-to-day objectives and have a clear picture of both what employees know
and how they perform,” said Axonify President and CEO Carol Leaman. “Via what
we refer to as ‘knowledge on demand’, employees can access supplemental
information and job aids whenever they need it for the job. This is pulled from
a constantly renewed repository of information
that is populated by a company’s subject matter experts and crowd-sourced by
its employee community.”

Customization is one of the main
advantages of Axonify’s program. ”What we offer is definitely not one-size-fits-all
content,” said Leaman. “Our program can adapt questions to what agents knew or
didn’t know the day before. No matter what the size of the organization, whether
it’s 50 or 50,000, everyone starts the same, but then changes based on
knowledge. Each individual follows their own learning path designed to provide
remediation of their capabilities. Unlike most eLearning programs that stop
after delivering the content, we can track individual behavior on the job and measure
if desired business outcomes are being met.”

For
example, Axonify’s solution can determine if agents are giving out too many
appeasements which have a financial cost to a company and determine if it’s due
to lack of knowledge of procedures or policies. Axonify has multichannel
capabilities and can provide detail on any interactions. The Axonify solution
relies on brain science, which brings principles
of brain-based learning into the corporate training environment. It operates on
three core principles:

Spaced repetition. This is the process of
taking information/knowledge and repeating delivery of it over predefined
intervals. Spacing is well-documented and proven to help learners retain access
to memorized information. A spacing algorithm is used to shrink time between
the same questions.

Confidence-based assessment. Researcher Dr. James Bruno identified a
link between knowledge, confidence and behavior and concluded that it’s the
fusion of knowledge and confidence that leads to appropriate behavior, and empowers
people to act. Confidence-Based Learning Methodology is a 2-dimensional
assessment in which each question generates a metric for correctness plus
confidence. This assessment model identifies what people know, and how
confident they are about their knowledge. “Often people with high confidence
and low knowledge are prone to making mistakes, whereas the converse are
sometimes hesitant in their interactions,” said Leaman.

One
intriguing aspect of Axonify’s program is its use of gamification. “We’ve incorporated it as a foundational element within
our platform, and employ 20 different game mechanics to drive participation,”
said Leaman. “It may begin as mindless game play for 2-3 minutes, which we call
a “slow start” but content is embedded within the game and it explodes out as it
progresses. It opens the mind to learning and pushes out distraction, allowing
the learner to focus on the content.” Axonify provides immediate feedback
through the reinforcement of right or wrong answer selection, continuously
engaging the learner. For participating and doing well, employees can
accumulate points used to redeem prizes, further enhancing the overall
experience

Gamification
is also one of the techniques used by Education Folder, a rising three year old
cloud based software education solution designed specifically for contact
centers. Its goal is to provide a structure for performance improvement, help simplify
processes, engage the agents as well as provide management reporting to measure
results.

The
eLearning platform includes audio and
video coursesin a Learning
Management System (LMS), with Agent
Assignment of courses and tracking,online
testing for comprehension and Agent
and course status reporting. It also offers Quality Assurance scoring offering
the capability to perform QA audits with online delivery to agents, electronic
review and acceptance as well as management reporting. “Our solution records
coaching sessions and provides a line chart on agent performance,” said
Education Folder CEO Craig Preston. “It can be overlaid with training quality
assurance and coaching vs metrics for individualized agent evaluation.”

Like
Great LearningWorks’ Ferrer, Preston’s roots are firmly in the contact center,
with a background of executive positions at major BPOs with knowledge of WFM.
He launched the company on the premise
that most businesses struggle with a number of tools required to deal with
agent performance and that most supervisors don’t take the time needed to
improve it. “Drive-by coaching doesn’t count,” he said. “In many places, agents
are simply paid to attend, and rigidly controlled with limited time slots for
training. There’s a need to spend quality time to effect real change and our
cloud-based solution allows for that.”

Unlike
Axonify or Great LearningWorks, which develop training content for the
companies they serve, the Education Folder solution is a delivery tool for
partner-developed content. Although they
do plan to incorporate content creation up the road, right now they adapt and
augment their clients’ training content via a number of methods, including
microlearning videos, game-based learning and a social media tool with a
Facebook emulation that enables clients to post positive agent accomplishments
along with birthdays, announcements and other internally meaningful posts. “We
took into account all of the pain points involved in managing contact center
agent performance,” said Preston, “then put the means to deal with them into
one highly affordable tool that requires no IT involvement to implement.”

While it may be a bit early to gauge the
full benefits of these advanced training solutions, Education Folder, which is
working with a major BPO as well as Direct Buy, reported that one team using
their solution had been consistently paying penalties for service problems was
able to stop completely. In another example, the sales conversion rate
increased by 30% within six months of implementation. Axonify, which is involved
with Telus, one of Canada’s leading communication companies among others, has
heard anecdotally that associates who were learning more felt better and that
attrition was consequently lower. Great LearningWorks noted that their solution
was able to increase learners’ comprehension of KPIs by 11% in one
implementation while contributing to an overall attrition reduction of 5.8% in
another contact center using their services.